Retreating Nazi Armies Intensify Anti-Jewish Terror in Ukraine

While the New Year finds thousands of Jews bravely fighting in the ranks of the Soviet Army in the front lines, ready to give their lives for the defense of their country and the defeat of Hitlerism, moving reports continue to reach here of the mass-murder of civilian Jews by the Nazis in occupied Soviet territory, especially in the Ukraine.

The full story of the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazi military command will probably not be known until the Soviet army, in its present unceasing drive against the retreating Nazi troops, regains the Jewish-populated cities of Kiev, Berditchev and Zhitomir where the Nazis are reported to have slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews without displaying any mercy even to women and children. Meanwhile, the latest report from Kiev which reached here today through secret channels gives a horrible picture of what has happened to the Jews in that city since the Nazi occupation.

The report reveals that in addition to executing practically the entire Jewish male population of Kiev on the charge that the Jews who remained in the city were "Soviet spies and guerrillas," the Nazi military command ordered thousands of Jews confined in mined cemetery grounds. The victims, most of them women, were then blown up by the exploding mines. Those who survived were machine-gunned to death by the German soldiers. (Earlier reports estimated that 52,000 Jews were murdered in Kiev when the Nazis first occupied the city.)

Attributing their present retreat to "Jewish spies," the Nazi military forces, according to the report, issued an order in the middle of December requesting all the remaining Jews in Kiev to report to the occupation authorities on a certain date. Aware of the fact that the order meant a new Jewish massacre, many Jewish mothers killed their children and committed suicide, while elderly Jews threw themselves to death by jumping from open windows. For days, the report says, their bodies remained untouched on the sidewalks of the streets of the city. The pathetic scenes of Jewish women killing their own children and later taking their own lives have driven many Jews to insanity, and one can now see insane Jews running wild in the streets of Kiev, provoking compassion on the part of the Ukrainian population which is living under the same Nazi terror and is hoping for the day of liberation from the Nazi yoke.

Similar reports are reaching here also from other Jewish-populated cities in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Military orders compel the Jews in every township in the Ukraine to report an masse at certain designated places, from where they are led away under military guard, without anybody ever hearing of them again.

[Editor’s note 2011: This article refers to the 1941 massacre known as Babi Yar.]